"The
truth is not a crystal that can be slipped into one's pocket, but an endless
river into which one falls headlong."

-- Robert
Musil

"Captures
perfectly the myriad stages of fear, discovery and elation that mark one's
first sexual experience... Beller paints a hauntingly accurate portrait
of a love affair laced with grown-up complications."

--New
York Times Book Review

"Detail
and emotion are rendered with astonishing precision and clarity. Readers
of Carver and Roth will not only be satisfied by this book, they'll be
thrilled."

--Dear
Reader, Square Books, Oxford, Mississippi

"Beller
is a master of the profound and fatal flaw... poetry is everywhere."

--Los
Angeles Times

"Smart
and funny. Beller has an admirable eye for detail, and a cutting observational
wit."

-- Deborah
Picker, L.A. Weekly

"A
frank, likeable book with an appealing central character."

--Janet
Maslin, The New York Times

"Beller
is writing in a genre - the guy-coming-of-age - that has been around for
a while. But in his modest way he changes the rules."

--Sarah
Kerr, Vogue

"Featuring
a New York that, like Kundera's Prague, is a vast hive of seductions and
betrayals, Beller's carefully crafted debut novel charts the coming-of-age
of Alex Fader.... Beller has the true novelist's knack for weaving together
the disparate threads of postmodern urban existence into convincing studies
of character. The vignettes of Alex's life coalesce into a moving portrait
of a young man intuitively seeking a place he can call home."

--Publishers
Weekly

"Fresh,
sophisticated, and most of all utterly readable."

--Eva
Hoffman

"This
is a book that is surprised by surprise. It is also a work of great optimism
and ambition."

--Elizabeth
Wurtzel

"Hits
a pitch of anguish so leavened by humour as to keep the reader off guard
in a satisfying if disturbing way."

--San Francisco
Chronicle

**

Publisher's
Comments:

"Writing
with the sparkling wit and insight of his highly praised debut, Seduction
Theory ("Brilliantly captures the great expectations and recurring
ambivalence of youth." New York Times), Thomas Beller continues to
plumb the adventures of his hero, Alex Fader, a youthful existentialist
and sensualist with an insatiable appetite for trouble. The Sleep-Over
Artist is an account of critical stages in Alex's life, mapping his progress
from youthful delinquent to filmmaker whose career begins when he makes
a documentary film exposing the prep school from which he has been expelled.
Alex longs for the taste of family life that the early death of his father
has denied him. As a young boy he sleeps over at his friends' houses and
ingratiates himself with their families; as a young man he extends his
sleep-overs to the lives of women, culminating in the ultimate sleep-over
– an affair in England with a glamorous, slightly older woman, the
mother of a young boy. Beller has a pitch-perfect ear for emotional nuance
and a microscopic eye for rendering the wordless moments when a relationship
catches fire and all too often begins to falter. The high-wire tension
that electrifies The Sleep-Over Artist is Beller's ingenious portrait
of a young man who longs to disappear and belong all at the same time."